Next took a very bad turn and double downed on it. Coupled with years of terrible bugs its beyond repair for me unless they rewind a bunch of core changes they did.

There are several much better options right now. My favourite is Tanstack Start. No magice, great DX

+1 for Tanstack start. I just setup a new project with it and like the whole ecosystem. Only slight disadvantage is most third party documentation and automatic setup with packages aren't setup for Tanstack Start yet.